Anaplan Software

Anaplan is a cloud-based business-planning tool designed for sales, finance, and operations units of an organization. The solution is based on hyperblock technology, the system that provides a single modeling environment for the organization with the ability to work on large models at a high speed.

Anaplan has a built-in application platform that allows an organization to quickly build or modify their planning applications. Its App Hub has pre-built applications for sales, operations, finance, and human resources along with a custom app module to modify these apps per organizational needs. The solution reduces end-to-end supply chain costs by aligning supply chain to market opportunities.

Anaplan’s platform creates a collaboration hub for cross-functional planning to enable distributed, on the ground expertise for corporate planning, delivering both top-down and bottom-up alignments. The feature includes multi-dimensional planning based on hierarchies, relationship, time, real-time modeling and calculation, central data repository and application cataloging.

Easy to use Planning tool

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Pros

Cloud focused, Helps us connect data and plan across different teams. Allows us to custom tools. Information and changes are available instantly.

Cons

Not in love with the reporting tools. Hard to format different areas of the tool. It needs to copy some of the useful excel functions.

Review Source

Joe from ResearchNow
Specialty: Other services

October 2015

October 2015

Anaplan is a game changer, but not without flaws

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Likes Best

Product - it's adaptability...you can build almost anything you want with the platform. Simple replacements of existing excel models take only hours to replicate.
Vendor - the constant upgrades to the system. 3-5 upgrades every year, and I have had a few of my personal requests added to the road map and eventually included in an upgrade, so they definitely listen to their customers on what to work on next.

Likes Least

Product - Metadata management. Within a single model it is great, but when you share the same metadata across models, it is really cumbersome to build the models to talk to each other constantly.
Vendor - the pricing model is bad, they get you in the door with a small workspace that quickly runs out due to not accurately estimating the size you would need, and then charge thousands of dollars per GB of extra space to fit what you wanted to do in the first place.

Recommendations

Don't just let them demo, really get into the details of how it works. Each of their "demos" are setup in "perfect world" examples and really showcase the abilities of the product, but in almost every case there have been reasons we can't build something similar due to the way the demo was setup.

Also make sure you are getting enough storage to do what you need to do, don't let them estimate size but have them show you a module with the appropriate dimensions built out and how big that module is.

Surprisingly powerful, and if data scheme designed carefully very easy to use

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Pros

Once built - incredibly quick to model business scenarios. Allows shared access to central data -avoiding version conflicts and different business numbers being circulated

Cons

Might be argued that it is relatively costly for what might effectively be seen as a spreadsheet - though it is much more

Review Source: Capterra

February 2018

February 2018

Anaplan is a huge time saver

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Pros

Before Anaplan, we were on excel documents that required many versions and iterations. We started with financial planning as a model and have since expanded into other solutions for issues that have arisen. The goal is to continue to plug new models into this tool, like many power users I've seen at Anaplan conferences, in order to get all of our data on one platform.

Cons

Initial set up requires a lot of learning and time. Their training session is several days and still requires additional follow up work and communication with their implementation team. Graphs and data visualization is also far lacking compared with Tableau or even Excel.

Review Source: Capterra

Neeraj from Wipro

December 2017

December 2017

Great planning tool

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Pros

SaaS based model for hosting and pricing perspective great use cases for finance and supply chain planning

Cons

Some of the Enterprise features are limited but mostly required features are there.Web based so some user who are used to desktop based reporting may find it difficult to use initially.

Review Source: Capterra

Alex from LegalZoom

October 2016

October 2016

New to Anaplan

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Training and support were great as we got started using this new system. We are still trying to figure out all the capabilities for Anaplan and how it interacts with our other systems including Salesforce, Xactly, and EDWBI. Overall though this is a great way to organize and track our forecasting, actuals, and goal metrics in order to measure success at an aggregate level.

Review Source: Capterra

Sarah from HelloWorld, Inc.

October 2016

October 2016

Impressed with Anaplan

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I've been very impressed with the functionality and capabilities that Anaplan offers. It also seems to be very versatile.

Review Source: Capterra

Sudar from own

October 2016

October 2016

Flexible tool

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Easy to use, learn and adapt. Fast applications and helps automate analytical decision making in supply chain with great partners with excellent industry knowledge.

Easy to use if you build the model right

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the software is billed as "as easy to use as a spreadsheet", but it does require a good implementer to get you to where you need to be. So my recommendation is to focus on the partner who can configure / build the tool to fit yoiur needs

Pros

UI is like a spreadsheet for sure

Cons

requires a very knowledgeable anaplan partner to set up hte model on which the "spreadsheet" will run. without that you will be one frustruated user

Review Source: Capterra

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